Goran Gračanin

Ivana’s small painting oeuvre has experienced what most creatives dream of: almost instant recognition by the profession and gallery owners.

An autodidact introduced to the world of brushes, canvases, and paints by her father, she reached for the palette after her father died in that human attempt to transcend through a shared medium and recreate what is most valuable: presence and emotion.

Painting almost Fauvist portraits and nudes, her pasty strokes create a mosaic of surfaces and lines in a collage-like manner. In their direct expression, they become symbols of the victory of life over death, joy over sorrow, and dialogue over eternal silence. Faces often face each other, covering the entire format in strong, pasty strokes of red, green, blue, yellow, and orange, almost directly from the tube, leaving a little monochromatic background for the observer’s eye. Ivana often separates them with black lines, creating the impression of stained glass through which polychromatic light shines.

Such an expressionist form of expression also carries an extremely decorative element, so Ivana’s works have already begun to live on practical objects. By printing umbrellas on canvas, her lively play of colors brings a touch of joy to a gray, rainy day. It is enough to see a few of Ivana’s works instantly be infected by the young painter’s cheerful, dynamic, bold, and open spirit. We recognize in the manner of imposing the painted object an echo of Pop Art; in the linear cascading of Mondrian’s surfaces, we feel Matisse’s Fauvism in the staccato of colors, Munch in the expression. It may sound pretentious to compare an autodidact with a minor opus with such great painters, but the beauty of Ivana’s intuitive expression lies precisely in its unburdenedness by academic form: let us remember the explosion on the scene when Basquiat emerged from the New York squats and shocked gallery owners with the audacity of his attitude and expression.

Although Picasso and Braque’s early cubism started from entirely different deconstructionist assumptions, gallerists from the Artifact Projects gallery in New York also recognized the influence of this collage composition of images. So, Ivan is waiting for an exhibition as part of the exhibition “Continuity: Modern and Contemporary Masters,” where he will exhibit his canvases side by side with Picasso, Matisse, and Miro.

All that remains is for us to carefully follow the media until the first large, independent exhibition in one of the domestic galleries and be ready to welcome the future inevitable name on the Croatian painting scene.